The Differences Between Men And Women On 'Doing It' With Strangers Are Pretty Extreme (As Per Study)

In an article from Psychology Today, David P Schmitt, Ph.D, analyzes the history of people's willingness to have sex with total strangers, most specifically the differences in behaviors exhibited by men and women. He does this by reviewing studies from decades/years past. For the purposes of this article, to ensure that you don't fall asleep on the toilet, I'm gonna go ahead and summarize the most interesting ones.

You're inevitably going to start to notice some shocking patterns. If you're a dude, you won't be so bothered. If anything, it'll be the reassurance you've always needed. If you're a woman, God bless.

"Over the last few decades almost all research studies have found that men are much more eager for causal sex than women are (Oliver & Hyde, 1993; Petersen & Hyde, 2010). This is especially true when it comes to desires for short-term mating with many different sexual partners (Schmitt et al., 2003), and is even more true for wanting to have sex with complete and total strangers (Tappé et al., 2013)."

"In a classic social psychological experiment from the 1980s, Clark and Hatfield (1989) put the idea of there being sex differences in consenting to sex with strangers to a real life test. They had experimental confederates approach college students across various campuses and ask "I've been noticing you around campus, I find you to be very attractive, would you go to bed with me tonight?" Around 75 percent of men agreed to have sex with a complete stranger, whereas no women (0 percent) agreed to sex with a complete stranger."

"Twenty years later, Hald and Høgh-Olesen (2010) largely replicated these findings in Denmark, with 59 percent of single men and 0 percent of single women agreeing to a stranger's proposition, “Would you go to bed with me?” Interestingly, they also asked participants who were already in relationships, finding 18 percent of men and 4 percent of women currently in a relationship responded positively to the request."

"In a French replication attempt, Guéguen (2011) had experimental confederates of various levels of physical attractiveness actually approach real-life strangers and ask if they would have sex. He found 83 percent of men agreed to have sex with a highly attractive woman, whereas only 3 percent of women agreed to have sex with a highly attractive man."